Most Treacherous Adventure

Saturday (your Friday) John and I and Steff and Phil had Budi for a good part of the day. He was excited to show us as much of this part of Bali as he could. The landscape.has changed to desert-ish dry land from wet thick green rainforest. We are living on a cliff rising from the Indian Ocean.

This morning the waves below are high and strong.

The surfers wait in the sand. Only two brave enough to venture out. This is where I’m planted until my 11:00 massage.

Back to yesterday.

Our first stop was Uluwatu Temple. Steps up, steps down and lots of aggressive monkeys waiting to steal anything shiny. Kept hats, glasses and water bottles hidden in pockets.

First the sarong. Love this color.

Monkey

Most of the Chinese tourists ignore the “monkey rules” and attempt to take selfies with the monkeys. We saw a monkey come up and grab the phone from a hand and scamper away into the brush. Bye bye phone!

Next Budi wanted to show us the hidden beach. We drove to a remote spot and found stairs that went down down down. Down down. Many stories of stairs. Here’s what was at the bottom that made the descent so worth it.

Truly I thought I would not make it back up. It took a loooong time and I stopped every 8-10 steps to sit down and stop shaking. At one sit down Budi yelled “Monkey, monkey, move it! He’s got an enemy chasing him!” Fastest I’d moved yet, scrambling up a couple of flights before turning around to check for my attacker. Gone, phew! Particularly long recovery after that exertion! But so proud that I did it.

We stopped at a “secret beach” next. A new highway has just been built and the surrounding land hasn’t been developed yet so this beach is pretty unknown, for now

We headed to the other (east) side of the peninsula to Nusa Dua resort area where all the big western hotel chains (Marriott, Hyatt, etc) have resorts. It looks very Palm Beachy.

Back to our private pool for a soak and a nap and delightful dinner hosted by John and Sue.